"Here's an Alt Tag for the Image": When AI-Written Alt Text Ships Unedited
Richard Burt has a genuinely strong story to tell — a career that started at the SEC in 1973, an AV Preeminent rating from Martindale-Hubbell, four decades running his own San Jose business law practice. None of that comes through in three of the images on his own homepage, because the alt text was never actually written.
What's live on the page right now
Alt attributes exist so that screen readers can describe an image to someone who can't see it, and so search engines know what an image depicts. On richardburtlaw.com, three of them still contain the literal instruction text from whatever tool generated them — never replaced with an actual description:
alt="Here's an alt tag for the image: Headshot of a man in a suit."
alt="Here's an alt tag for the image: `AV Peer Review Rated, Richard G. Burt, 2010`"
alt="Here's an alt tag for the image in under 8 words: Avvo Rating: Richard Gary Burt, Top Attorney 10.0"
Why the first one stings the most
The first image is Mr. Burt's own headshot — the photo doing the most work to build trust with a prospective client meeting him for the first time. A visitor using a screen reader doesn't hear a description of a confident, experienced attorney. They hear the AI tool's own instructions to itself, read back verbatim, including the meta-comment about an 8-word limit that was clearly meant for whoever generated the text — not for the person visiting the site.
It's an easy mistake to make and an easy one to miss: the text renders invisibly in a normal browser, so nothing looks wrong unless you inspect the source or use a screen reader yourself. But it's exactly the kind of gap that matters most for the one audience it's failing — and it's indexed by search engines in the meantime, which will happily surface "Here's an alt tag for the image" as the description of a founding partner's headshot.
The fix
Three images, three real descriptions — a fifteen-minute fix once someone notices it. The broader lesson is the one worth sitting with: AI-assisted content tools are genuinely useful for a first pass, but a first pass is what it stays until a human actually reads the output before it goes live.
We check things like this by hand, on every property we touch — because a passing accessibility score doesn't catch what a real screen reader hears.
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